e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: cMOOC

  • Blueprint for a post-LMS, Part 3

    In the first part of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that supports conversation-based courses. In the second part, I brought up a use case of a kind of faculty professional development course that works as a distributed flip, based on our forthcoming e-Literate TV series on personalized learning. In the next two posts, I’m going to go into some aspects of the system design. But before I do that, I want to address a concern that some readers have raised. Pointing to my apparently infamous “Dammit, the LMS” post, they raise the question of whether I am guilty of a certain amount of techno-utopianism. Whether I’m assuming just building a new widget will solve a difficult social problem. And whether any system, even if it starts out relatively pure, will inevitably become just another LMS as the same social forces come into play.

    chasmillustration6

    I hope not. The core lesson of “Dammit, the LMS” is that platform innovations will not propagate unless the pedagogical changes that take advantages of those changes also propagate, and pedagogical changes will not propagate without changes in the institutional culture in which they are embedded. Given that context, the use case I proposed in part 2 of this series is every bit as important as the design goals in part 1 because it provides a mechanism by which we may influence the culture. This actually aligns well with the “use scale appropriately” design goal from part 1, which included this bit:

    Right now, there is a lot of value to the individual teacher of being able to close the classroom door and work unobserved by others. I would like to both lower barriers to sharing and increase the incentives to do so. The right platform can help with that, although it’s very tricky. Learning Object Repositories, for example, have largely failed to be game changers in this regard, except within a handful of programs or schools that have made major efforts to drive adoption. One problem with repositories is that they demand work on the part of the faculty while providing little in the way of rewards for sharing. If we are going to overcome the cultural inhibitions around sharing, then we have to make the barrier as low as possible and the reward as high as possible.

    When we get to part 4 of the series, I hope to show how the platform, pedagogy, and culture might co-evolve through a combination of curriculum design, learning design, platform design, prepared for faculty as participants in a low-stakes environment. But before we get there, I have to first put some building blocks in place related to fostering and assessing educational conversation. That’s what I’m going to try to do in this post.

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  • Blueprint for a Post-LMS, Part 2

    In the first post of this series, I identified four design goals for a learning platform that would be well suited for discussion-based courses:

    1. Kill the grade book in order to get faculty away from concocting arcane and artificial grading schemes and more focused on direct measures of student progress.
    2. Use scale appropriately in order to gain pedagogical and cost/access benefits while still preserving the value of the local cohort guided by an expert faculty member, as well as to propagate exemplary course designs and pedagogical practices more quickly.
    3. Assess authentically through authentic conversations in order to give credit for the higher order competencies that students display in authentic problem-solving conversations.
    4. Leverage the socially constructed nature of expertise (and therefore competence) in order to develop new assessment measures based on the students’ abilities to join, facilitate, and get the full benefits from trust networks.

    I also argued that platform design and learning design are intertwined. One implication of this is that there is no platform that will magically make education dramatically better if it works against the grain of the teaching practices in which it is embedded. The two need to co-evolve.

    This last bit is an exceedingly tough nut to crack. If we were to design a great platform for conversation-based courses but it got adopted for typical lecture/test courses, the odds are that faculty would judge the platform to be “bad.” And indeed it would be, for them, because it wouldn’t have been designed to meet their particular teaching needs. At the same time, one of our goals is to use the platform to propagate exemplary pedagogical practices. We have a chicken and egg problem. On top of that, our goals suggest assessment solutions that differ radically from traditional ones, but we only have a vague idea so far of what they will be or how they will work. We don’t know what it will take to get them to the point where faculty and students generally agree that they are “fair,” and that they measure something meaningful. This is not a problem we can afford to take lightly. And finally, while one of our goals is to get teachers to share exemplary designs and practices, we will have to overcome significant cultural inhibitions to make this happen. Sometimes systems do improve sharing behavior simply by making sharing trivially easy—we see that with social platforms like Twitter and Facebook, for example—but it is not at all clear that just making it easy to share will improve the kind of sharing we want to encourage among faculty. We need to experiment in order to find out what it takes to help faculty become comfortable or even enthusiastic about sharing their course designs. Any one of these challenges could kill the platform if we fail to take them seriously.

    When faced with a hard problem, it’s a good idea to find a simpler one you can solve that will get you partway to your goal. That’s what the use case I’m about to describe is designed to do. The first iteration of any truly new system should be designed as an experiment that can test hypotheses and assumptions. And the first rule of experimental design is to control the variables.

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